As a Medici, Giulia believed happiness was having to surrender nothing. She ran a finger across the smear of icing on her plate. “What’s the latest with the pope, il diavolo?”
“May His Holiness live eternally,” he said, cocking a head toward the servants.
“May His Holiness fast himself unto death,” she said, “and be buried under a pile of outlawed books.” She dropped her fork. “If you’d given me time to unpack, I might have found my skirts.”
“You had them on in the carriage. Did you check there?”
“I don’t recall anything in the carriage troubling them in the least.”
He stood up and bowed to his lady. “You’re a witch, and I’ll send you back.”
First a letter to the duke, with all the appropriate details of travel (the poor meals, the night at the house of the minor noble, the first view of the ancient city, described as any traveler has ever described it, as a marble rug under which a child had hidden various lumpish toys), and then the letter to the duchess, with all the rest: the layer of dust on the horses, the fly in the carriage, the snores of Bernardetto, her clockwork courses still not coming, so she’d worn the linen rags for nothing. The way the handle of the door knocked against her face whenever she tried to sleep, the terraces of passing grapes that begged for a hungry girl to fly through them. A porcupine that reared up in front of the horses and shook its quills like a Spanish dancer. And Rome! Its clutter, its stink, the hodgepodge of stone and brick, the vines turning the ruins into gardens, stage sets. Leonor had given her poems from Laura Battiferri before she left; they’d seemed exaggerated. But the Tiber really did look like a drowned woman.
The light was beginning to fall, and she didn’t know where the candles were kept in this rented house. The savoiardi were attempting to climb back up her gullet. The bustle out her window hadn’t ceased. At home, a merchant couldn’t get within two hundred feet of the Palazzo Pitti; the duke even wanted to build a floating tunnel so he wouldn’t have to brush against anyone’s homespun wool. Maybe it was the wool, maybe it was the chance of assassination. Cosimo’s own nonna once sent an envelope filled with arsenic to the pope, Christ bless her memory. Giulia needed to remember to jam a chair under the door handle before she slept.
For twenty-four years she’d been the lady-in-waiting; the bastard princess; a chess piece; too dark to be opinionated. And now that she was cut loose, her lungs filling with Roman brightness, an insect had built a house in her nethers.
A tap at the door. “Is it time for undressing?”
“Take your own clothes off, Paola,” she said. “We’re in the city now.”
Paola would not be deterred. She clucked as she unknotted the laces on Giulia’s bodice, sighed as she rubbed her swollen ankles, rolled her eyes to the ceiling when the princess said she’d wash her own monthly linens.
“I heard you had a letter today from Florence.”
Giulia didn’t reply.
“My lady thinks herself motherless. But if you should ever—”
“Your lady has no need for anything remotely maternal.”
Before they’d arrived in Rome, someone had swept the dust out of this bedroom, taken the covers off the furniture, made the bed with new sheets on a fluffed mattress, spread out an embroidered quilt with velvet trim that would be soft on a sleeper’s chin. Someone performed these rituals of service without knowing who’d receive them. It didn’t matter. The beauty of wealth was that it spread over secrets like butter.
Her grandmother was a servant, her grandmother was African, her grandmother was not an exotic coffee-colored princess, her grandmother was a black maid. She’d slept with a celibate pope, under what circumstances no one ever said, and bore a curly-headed child whose papal blood outmatched his race, and this became Giulia’s father, a Duke of Florence, a model of unshakable apathy when it came to other people’s opinions. He left this to her in his will. Stabbed to death at twenty-six. They laid out his body in a house with the Medici elders’ motto in stone: glovis, which is a backward si volge, it turns. (She could imagine him crowing to guests, “Get it?”) Her widowed ice-white mother never pulled the small Giulia onto her lap and squeezed beneath her arms. Never lay beside her on the narrow mattress when she dreamed of goblins and the Arno flooding. The gardener at the palace once called Giulia a little lioness. “It’s not because you’re African,” he said, “but because your teeth are long as knives.”
Her cousin Cosimo just seventeen, a brand-new duke, and she an orphaned two-year-old brat. A month in the convent, six months with an aunt, another convent, a farm, a school, until a milk-skinned goddess had asked her new groom, “What of your wards?” and recalled the children to court. She’d slept in the nursery with Cosimo’s own children, while his wife Leonor, she of the swan neck and the snail ears, made sure all their cloaks matched and their plates were equally piled at breakfast. She feigned ignorance of Giulia’s three books, each stolen under cover of night from the communal shelves of the Medici. The girl kept them under her mattress—Orlando Furioso and Le Morte d’Arthur and Amadis de Gaula—and had trained herself to sleep on the left side of the bed so as not to roll over them.
Leonor was the first in Florence to wear that dove-gray satin that crinkled when you pressed a hand to it, like wrapping paper. It was Leonor who greased Giulia’s hair, pumiced her forehead, powdered her face with white lead, painted her lips to turn them from plum to cherry. The old nurse refused to comb out her curls, so they hired a new one. The previous duke, Giulia’s dead father, was called Il Moro, but it was like calling a czar The Red; Alessandro simply had a black brow, a black heart, a black sword. Leonor with her skin like goosedown. She held Giulia on one knee and Cosimo’s bastard Bia on the other, and not once did she call the younger child Bianca, because to do so would’ve been to acknowledge how pale that child’s skin was, how fair her hair, how minuscule her nose. And when Giulia was seven and Bia was six and the fever came, Leonor insisted they be nursed in the same room, even though Giulia contracted it first, and when Bia who was really Bianca died and a servant said with a snaky tongue that, given Giulia’s breed, no wonder she’d prevailed, it was Leonor who let Giulia sleep in her bed for a week after the funeral. If Leonor ever died, heaven prevent it, Giulia would fight for the inheritance of that dove-gray satin; if she slipped it on, surely it would turn her skin as white as the underside of a fish, fish-belly pale, as milk-smooth as any princess of Europe, virginal, that dove-gray dress.
She woke from this dream in Rome—alone in the great bed, limbs sprawled—with the stranger surging in her abdomen. After she emptied her bladder in the chamberpot, the sense of pressure eased. But her body was swallowing itself. There was a jellyfish inside, stretching and pinching. A tweak in her low hips, a sting across her breasts. The pain webbed her muscles. If she wasn’t sick, was she dying? [I hope He’s watching, because sakes alive, I’m trying to be patient. You’re not dying, you primped charcoal maiden. You can’t win me with feints of self-deception. You’re a woman who asks for too many things, a man-tricker, a dilettante in bad behavior; you’re the girl at a party who says, “The Devil? I talked to him last week; we’re close,” when I’ve never noticed you in my life, not your tender ears, your wild tendrils, your once-impossible waist. Besides, my heart’s taken; taken, broken, unrepaired.] She wanted it out of her.
In the last moments of spring, when one could feel the blanket of summer inching across Florence like a slug, flattening the breezes, Leonor had brought a young man to their country house, the Villa di Castello, to paint the daughters of the duke. Named Alessandro, like Giulia’s father, he carried with him a box of colors and ink-dark eyes.
Alessandro Allori started with Maria, the oldest of the legitimate children and the one who most looked like she was already a painting, her teenaged skin unblemished, those red ringlets etched in a blazing mass atop her head. Leonor made her pose with a book in her hand so at least the Medici would seem well-read. Then Isabella, two years younger
and two degrees plainer, with her lapdog under one hand, because even if the Medici weren’t all beauties, at least they were rich enough to have animals the size of dolls.
Giulia passed him a few times in the long halls of the villa, with his sketchbook held to his narrow chest. She’d seen Bronzino when he came to paint the duke and duchess and baby Bia before she died, and he fit her vision of the masculine artist—middle-aged and richly bearded, with a pocket of sweets for little girls. But this person was slender as a candle flame, and as diminishing. He shivered when he passed below Botticelli’s nude Aphrodite in her shell, which the duke had hung so the morning sun would light her lion hair.
“I’d like Allori to capture you too,” Leonor said one night as she brushed out her ward’s tangles.
Freed from its knot and veil, her unsmoothed hair in the mirror looked like a pine forest after a hurricane. She put a finger on her short nose, dragged it down to her uneven mouth. Any beauty she had was in movement, in expression. “No, but thank you,” she said, squeezing an eye shut as the duchess dug into a thorny patch. “I’m not suited for portraits.”
In public, Giulia was still wearing her dark weeds for Francesco, but on days when she stayed inside, folded onto a sofa with a poem, she wore bright silks; that was how she felt about widowhood.
“You’re not suited because you can’t sit still. If it took ten minutes to make a likeness, all of Tuscany could see how lovely you are.”
Giulia swatted Leonor’s hand away.
“You’ll do it because I’m asking. And the boy painter has asked particularly. I think it’s because you wander around in that red robe all day.”
“I’ll sit for one afternoon in all the black you can wrap me in. If he can’t finish in a day, he’ll have to content himself with a sketch.”
Leonor wrapped her hair in a tight cloth and kissed her forehead. “And you’ll hold your tongue and not torture Allori.”
“Allooori,” Giulia drawled, in the same tone she’d tease her little cousins with an allora. They’d wait openmouthed for the answer, the next task, the follow-up, and she’d keep them waiting, dragging out the now, the so, the allooora. “Do I get a book or a dog?” she asked.
“Just don’t let him give you a handkerchief. I’ve never seen a portrait of a man holding a piece of limp fabric.”
“Whatever happened to Nonna’s painting?” When Giulia was two, a man had painted Cosimo’s mother, the unyielding Maria Salviati, with her favorite of the illegitimate babes in Cosimo’s court. Giulia had been strapped to the leg of a chair so she wouldn’t bolt off, but she’d never seen the final portrait.
“The painter didn’t have a kind eye.”
“Made Nonna look too old?”
“Get to sleep.” Leonor pulled her off the bench and shoved her toward her childhood bed. “The artist made you two look nothing alike.”
“They made me look like an African baby.”
“You just didn’t seem like you were in the same family. She put it in the wine cellar.”
Giulia pulled the sheet up to her nose so her uneven mouth was covered. “And you want to do it again.”
Leonor sat on the side of the mattress and squeezed around her ward’s body, cocooning her.
She pulled the sheet up to her eyes. “Why do you love me?”
Leonor scrunched her nose and leaned in close. “Because you were sent by the Devil, and I must appease you.”
The duchess snuffed the candles on her way out, leaving the room with a smoky scent that always reminded Giulia of church, and when she was in church, reminded her of bed.
“It’s like looking from earth into heaven.” The cardinal was young and prim, and clasped his plump hands in front of his robes as he gazed up at the cathedral’s vaults.
“With a ceiling between,” she said.
It was a deeper blue than others she’d seen—a French blue, they called it—and golden twinkles marched along with regularity, as though the artist had never seen a night sky’s chaos.
“It makes poor God seem like a child,” she added. “One star here, one star there, one star there.”
The cardinal coughed in distress.
In truth, Santa Maria sopra Minerva was just to her taste. It wrapped one up in beauty, didn’t push one back the way the basilicas did, to make humans feel like roaches, scurrying along the edge of the nave so God wouldn’t spot them and shriek.
She’d asked for Father Lorenzo to be her chaperone. The young devout hailed from Pianoro, and from eavesdropped conversations in the Medici salons, Giulia happened to know his local monastery was both mismanaged and dangerously low on funds. The local nobles had migrated to Modena and Bologna and abandoned their stakes. But in the crisscross of allegiances in central Italy, if a large expanse of rent-producing land didn’t belong to your allies, it wound up with your enemies. Imagine Emperor Ferdinand and his Habsburg henchmen with an estate large enough to feed an army, three days’ ride from the Vatican Hill. While the dukes of the region were squabbling over women and wine, no one saw this fuzz-mustached cardinal as anything but an arm for an idle princess to lean on.
She lifted her skirts as she stepped up to the altar, so that, if he chose, the cardinal could examine her shoes. “Tell me why it’s all right to build a church on top of temples to Minerva and Isis, who—if memory serves—weren’t terribly Christian. Are you trying to squash them? Because I can tell you now, ghosts don’t have bodies. That’s why they last so long. Look, a hundred pagans are probably haunting this old place, interfering with the mass.”
He had a habit of trailing at her elbow, as if on a short leash. “Some believe God’s wisdom is a long thread that the ancients too grabbed hold of. Plato, Zoroaster, the Egyptian cults. They’re part of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology. We’re not trying to squash the good.”
“I wouldn’t say you’re aggressively pursuing the good either. I’m as devout as the next woman—perhaps—but even I can see this pope is—” As he reddened, she slipped her arm in his. “Forgive me. Tell me about your home, and what you miss.”
His family, the farm, the grammar school, the monastery with its white walls and its gardens to rival Babylon, gardens which grew brown and tangled now the abbot was dotty and the duke was dead.
“You need a patron,” she said.
He brushed one finger along his upper lip and looked over her shoulder to where the older cardinals were consulting with her husband.
“Or at least a purchaser. I hate the thought of your poor brothers wandering around a grove of dead oranges. If they were besieged? What defenders would they have? And my friend—think of the women.”
His shoulder was twitching now in what appeared to be great discomfort. Resting her hand on it didn’t seem to help. “I’m honored,” he said. “Honored. But this is not a matter—”
A friar bustled in to clear the visitors out before the evening mass, and the cardinal began mumbling a prayer to his savior. Giulia whispered the name of the palace where she was staying, and added, “I have no wish to offend, merely to help. Consider me a man of business.” But she flicked her skirts as she left to join her husband. She only had the tools at hand, and lived in the stifling smithy where they were made.
“Charming the religious?” her husband asked.
“This church is making me itch.”
“I thought you’d admire it.”
She loved it, she thought it as filigreed and fine as a fairy tale, she wanted to set up a bed in the aisle and make it her own echoing home, but it was ruined by being filled with men. Men who assumed that because it was lovely, she would love it. The nausea surged up again.
“I want to see if there are letters at home. And I’ve worn the wrong shoes.”
“Shall I carry you?” Bernardetto asked.
The red-robed men had dispersed, confident the young prince would pass along their names to the Duke of Florence, the only man of real import. She tugged on his ear and said without shame in Christ�
�s house, “I wouldn’t let you get that close to my backside.”
There weren’t any letters, only the one she wouldn’t open from Florence, from him, so she draped herself and Paola in matching veils and turned left outside the palace door. How much Romans looked like Florentines, and yet how oddly they tied their hats to one side; she felt she was in a slightly tilted version of home. But the people were only ornaments on their city, that trash heap of columns on columns, brick on marble, church on house on tomb. Vines and cows trailed through arches. It was like a broken poem; its gravity made her feel more daring. A man with a cart of greens cried out, Petrosello, mempitella, serapullo, ramoraccia. Paola danced around piles of slop and manure. Why did the streets keep circling round? [You’re caught in the half-moon near the Campo de’ Fiori, where Pompey’s amphitheatre once housed 18,000 fans and their roasted nuts, the alleys following the arch of the bleachers, the same theatre where Caesar’s body opened in twenty-three wounds. But this is invisible to you; the campo is a market. The population has shrunk from one million to fifty thousand. Even if I pressed tight your head in my hands, you couldn’t imagine the old Tavern of the Cow scooped of its innards and fitted with a glass-fronted counter, a young man flirting as he slices pizza al taglio for tourists, some darker than you—“Così?” he asks. “This big?”] She thought of all the other cities in the world—Tenochtitlan to Beijing—and wanted desperately to split her body into equal clones and scatter them, and the worst thing suddenly wasn’t that an alien blossomed inside her but that she knew as a woman she wouldn’t ever see Tabriz.
From the stream of passersby, a girl with a yellow cap broke off and came to a gate in the wall. Her dark hair was almost as coiled as Giulia’s. “It’s late,” she said, and disappeared into the ghetto.
The Everlasting Page 5